Brexit Blues

I’m weary beyond words at the ongoing disaster that is Brexit. Yes, I'm an American citizen who cannot vote in the UK. Fundamentally, I’m an outsider to the culture I now share. But I’ve come to regard London as my home. In this city-state of exiles, I’m one of many who both lose and find themselves in its vast sea of diversity. I have a stake in what happens.

Brexit is a disaster. For me, an older urban intellectual, the impact will be less dire than for those whose livelihood depends on freedom of trade, goods and services. I worry not about my job but about such things as traveling freely to other European countries. This is not said smugly; I know how lucky I am not to be struggling with the economics of a non-European UK.

Basically, it's the stupidity and provincialism of Brexit that outrage me. The UK will be isolated in a world increasingly disordered. It will cut itself off from an EU entity that gives it protection against an increasingly predatory USA and a rising China. The exclusion of potential immigrants will drain London's energy, and no doubt impact the labour force in towns outside London.

In truth, I don't know how it will impact places outside London. I'm less concerned than a good lefty liberal should be. It's the city I care about. I'm a rootless cosmopolitan, and what I value are ideas, diversity, edgy thinking, mixing up of cultures and people, the creative goo arising from confusion. I don't want London to lose its messy soul.

As an American, I can tell you most Americans like Britain for its cool accent and its historical pageantry. Period. When US citizens glance up from their isolation and look out at the world, Britian is not the first place that comes to mind--or even the fifth. It's a delusion to think Britain can see the US as a reliable trading partner--or a reliable anything else. And this will be true even if a non-sociopath replaces the current President.

As the Brexit tumoil rumbles on, I want to scream 'stop, stop before it's too late.' There's some hope the worst of it can be derailed. It was, after all, only fifty two percent who voted Leave against forty eight for Remain. In the US, you can't even change a postal route with that kind of feeble majority. But who knows what madness lurks in the heart of the UK's politicians and how potent the forces for little England are?

-Rose Levinson

A conversation between ourselves

I see my dear friend and co-contributor (a.k.a. Rose, EV’s Managing Editor) is at a loss to know what is going on with the UK and Brexit. I’m going to try and answer! I am British (probably English) as far back as I can go but share many of the feelings that Rose describes despite our contrasting provenance. Of course that is because we are both active participants in London’s diverse and lively culture where identity, on the whole, is open, flexible and welcoming.

For this reason alone, it’s easy to see only the positives about the current status quo (that we don’t want to change) for it is one that embraces the mingling of cultures from near and far and the sharing of lives jointly committed to the development of common values and outlooks. Yes, a thousand times, yes, we must remain! We metropolitans love it and don’t want anything to change.

But even in London, it would be foolish to assume wholesale acceptance. Material conditions are poor for many Londoners, and yet, somehow even for them, optimism pertains. Move out of London, though, and life and outlook can be very different. Go to the run-down northern industrial towns, the depressed agricultural areas, and the coastal resorts whose Victorian splendour has long gone, there is little optimism and scarce expectation of benefit deriving from an opening of arms and a welcoming of strangers. Life has dealt them a hard hand of cards and Brexit might just be one way of transformation.

What’s more, the views of the so-called “liberal elite” (largely the remain-supporting intelligentsia) – a demeaning term used by Brexiter-leading-lights to spread class-based division between remainers and leavers – are scorned in Brexit-land. The intelligentsia is depicted as arrogant and superior, as well as urban and educated, and Brexiter hard-liners continue to poison the minds of pro-leavers by luring them into ever-more drastic ‘no deal’ positions which, most predictions suggest, will be dire for everyone.

But remainers are not free from blame. The early failure to impose checks and balances (such as raising the threshold for what counted as a necessary majority in the referendum and ensuring that accurate information about the pros and cons of both sides’ cases was provided prior to the vote) can perhaps be seen, with good reason, to be a direct consequence of a certain elitist (and remainer) “we know best” arrogance, seized on by the Brexit ideologists, thus guaranteeing its own defeat. Sadly, a second “people’s vote” (a term, in its own way, conveying a certain sense of “them and us”) will only confirm for leavers that their “superiors” have still not got the message.

But we remainers struggle on!!

Gillian Dalley

Lament for My Mother, Florence

‘When I was a child, I spake as a child. …. My mother was angry when  I came home from secondary school with a grade D in maths class. Raging with frustration and fear, she railed, ‘You’ll never go to university. You’ll be just a secretary. What will you do with your life?” Good question. I had no idea what I’d do with my life. All I knew was wanting a life unlike hers, constricted as it was by not enough money and too many tasks. Along with working as a bookkeeper and rearing me and my sister., she tended her sick parents and kept my labourer-father from totally giving in to recurring despair.   It was a dismal time, that long-ago childhood. Would those long-ago turbulent memories would leave me. But childhood memories  don’t go away. My internalized mother doesn’t depart. Sometimes it’s as though I never left our drab living room with its large black and white television set, red bound copies of  Encyclopedia Brittanica and Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, the green plush sofa with scratched wooden armrests, lamps that never fully lightened the yellow-beige interior. Hot Florida days when I had to water the lawn, trudging in the humidity in my schoolgirl shorts and badly cut hair. 5 o’clock meals of frozen peas and overcooked beef. The sight of medical paraphenalia in my grandmother’s back bedroom. What did I learn from my mother? That  I was smart though not pretty; my curiosity was a trial and my uneven temperament was cause for dismissal—but that something better was out there and I had to look for it. My mother gave me life but she couldn’t give me succor. My mother gave me goals but she had no balm for sadness. My mother wanted love but  knew I wouldn’t give it. My mother bade me go. I released her hand and left home. What can I give her now? Of course, I’m asking what to give myself as forgiveness for the hateful indifference I felt towards her. There’s a notion that the child can redeem the parent, his or her life making up deficiencies that came before. I don’t know that I’ve redeemed my mother’s life. When I knew her, whatever dreams she had were squashed by circumstance. But though she had so little, she asked for even less. As if to atone for her shortcomings as a parent, she was oddly self-sufficient and sought little from me or my sister. It came across as selfishness and disinterest in us. It still feels that way. She was never one to praise or delight in her daughters’ triumphs or soothe them in their pains.  As I reflect now, trying to understand what a child could not, perhaps her withholding was a way of protecting herself and us. Perhaps her mind whispered ‘don’t ask anything of Rose or her sister Maxine, nor of anyone else. Get on with it. Do it alone.’ What’s the point I want to make? Primarily it’s to acknowledge what I think is a truism: we never completely leave our mothers ,no matter how educated nor accomplished we are. If childhood is remembered positively, those memories are filled with pleasant longing, a desire to re-visit the past, . If childhood was fraught, we seek to obliterate it or at least  loosen its hold on how we see ourselves. The desire to soften the harshness of a bad childhood, to run from it, can smudge the adult as she struggles to grow up. Whether we wish to return to childhood figments or rub them out, our mothers remain until they vanish with our final leavetaking. Perhaps that’s why I want to atone for not loving my mother, whose name was Florence. I fear not being loved by those who may, at least for a little while, remember me.

Rose Levinson, Autumn 2018